Please Let It Stop

by Gold, Jacqueline

  Sometimes the future comes too early, as it did when Mum’s illness began to savage her body. In June 2003 she died. We had known it was going to happen soon: her cancer was too far gone and had ravaged her in a matter of months, but that still didn’t make it easy to accept. It had been a difficult few months, and Vanessa and I were relying heavily on one another. I am sad to say that Dan was not much help. His obsession with having a baby and with his own happiness meant that when I needed him most, I was not getting any support. One evening I was feeling very low and asked him if he could come straight home after work. He replied that he couldn’t since he had to be at a retirement party. Nothing I said would change his mind.

  Three weeks before our mother died, Vanessa and I took the difficult decision to put her in a home. She was fragile, both physically and mentally, and John wasn’t looking after her. In fact, as time went on, he showed even less compassion. We knew Mum did not have long to live and although we were aware that moving someone to a home can make them deteriorate more quickly because of the physical and emotional upheaval of leaving their own environment, we felt that she was in much more danger from John’s indifference. We managed to find a nursing home close to where both Vanessa and I lived. It seemed good, there were nurses there and we knew she would be cared for. John was very relieved. He kept saying things like, ‘I can’t sit here and watch her die,’ as if he cared, but we knew it was all about him, not her. Still trying to protect me from having too much to do with John, Vanessa went to the house to help put Mum into the vehicle they had sent for her. I waited down the road and then got in with her. I told her gently that she was just going into hospital for a few tests. We didn’t want to frighten her by saying she was going into a home. Her dementia was very advanced by this stage and we were worried that anything could have confused or frightened her even more.

  Vanessa and I took it in turns to be at the home with her. We were there pretty much all of the time, except when we went home to sleep. One night in June 2003 they called us to say the time was near. We quickly got dressed and raced to the home to be with her. We sat with her and held her hand. She had lived such a lonely life and there was no way we were going to let her die alone. John did not visit her once from the time she went into the home. In fact, nobody visited her except Vanessa and I and my father, who spent time with her the day before she died. When we arrived there that night she had deteriorated very rapidly. It could have been the dementia talking but she kept asking for my dad. This was the first time I’d experienced death. Nothing prepares you for it, least of all anything you see on television or in the cinema. There they present a scenario where, no matter what illness the person seems to have, they go peacefully and quietly. It all looks very painless. People with terrible illnesses do not die peacefully. They struggle and they gasp for every breath. To watch my mum going through it was harrowing and it is something I will never forget. At one point I tried to cover Vanessa’s eyes but she wouldn’t let me. Mum died with us both by her side, holding her hand. We sat there in silence at the realisation it was over and that she was gone. For all that had happened in the past she passed away knowing that we loved her. As soon as Dad heard he came up to the home to support us and then sat with Mum on his own for over an hour. We then we had to ring people and tell them. I sometimes wonder what the point was of calling anyone since she did not have any friends visit in her dying days. As far as I’m aware, even Vera, who had been at her wedding, did not come. Without wanting to apportion blame, I don’t think Mum was given the correct palliative care. She suffered a lot of pain and had no access to a Macmillan nurse, which she should have had. While the home was good and they had nurses to administer her morphine, there was not enough support in the lead up to her transfer there and it was too late to change things once she’d moved there. We did actually go looking for a hospice at that time but the ones that were close by were all full. I think she slipped through the net, partly because of the way her GP would not speak to Vanessa and me, insisting on speaking to John, who was largely indifferent.

  There is no doubt that my mother suffered far more than she needed to – and she is just one of thousands of people who are treated in the same way. I find it extraordinary that we let people go through pain to the very end of their lives, deluding ourselves that they are dying a ‘natural’ death. There is nothing natural about suffering when you are patently going to die in a few hours or a few days. I would not have said this before having this experience, but now I think sometimes the way we treat the dying is totally inhumane. Sure, there are ethics involved but I have a sneaking suspicion that, like many things in this world, it’s not just about that but also about people being too frightened of being sued. I don’t have the answers but I do know we all need a better choice than the one we have. On the day Mum died I called Dr Clark, who was responsible for her nursing home in Caterham, and said, ‘There must be something you can give her to speed this up.’ She was literally crying out.

  His words were, ‘You wouldn’t treat a dog like this, would you?’ Until you are right next to them, you don’t know how it feels to see someone suffer, to watch them go to the very end attached to a morphine pump – which I desperately wished would speed up. I couldn’t bear watching her suffer and, although it may sound shocking to some people, if the doctor had said, ‘Here you are, this will help her. I won’t do it but you can,’ then I would have done it.

  Mum’s funeral was held at St Mark’s Church in Biggin Hill. I was so depressed about everything by then, I didn’t shed tears. Mum was dead, I had problems with Dan and I was worn out from depression, although nobody at the time had told me it was that. I just felt so empty and all I could do was hang on, dealing with each minute as it came. Not least listening to the vicar reading the sermon with material John had provided – saying things like, ‘She had friends that really cared about her.’ Well, she didn’t have many friends because he didn’t like it unless they were also friends of his, but where were they when she needed them most? He put on such a show at the funeral, walking behind the hearse and pretending to be the loving, bereaved widower.

  Grieving Mum was a very difficult process. Normally, when you lose someone you love you take comfort in reflecting over wonderful memories. Sadly, neither Vanessa or I could recall one happy memory to remember her by. My mother was terrified of life and met a man who made her more terrified. He eroded any confidence and self-esteem she had. She lived a totally negative life, one that may have not helped her when her illness came along and possibly made things worse. But she chose him. She had the chance not to choose him a second time, but she did, and it sealed her fate.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Putting the government on trial

  Serious cracks were starting to appear in my personal life in 2003 but I had some pressing business to attend to with the government which had begun around a year earlier. We’d been advertising Ann Summers job vacancies with JobCentrePlus for some years. In early 2002 I learnt that they were no longer taking our advertisements. JobCentrePlus is part of the Department of Work and Pensions and we couldn’t understand the change in policy. Our enquiries revealed that they didn’t seem to know why they’d done it, either. It seems that someone in the organisation had suddenly decided that it was inappropriate for JobCentrePlus to continue to advertise vacancies at Ann Summers because we were a ‘sex shop’. This is what happens when you have someone who doesn’t know what we do – they have their own beliefs and they cannot see past their own preconceived ideas.

  I wrote to them, pointing out that we’d had great success with our placements from them over the years and many of the people we’d hired had risen to managerial positions within the company. Their reply stated, ‘We do not accept any job ads for any business related to the sex industry.’ I wrote again letting them know that we were not a sex shop because in order to be one, you had to have a license – our shops were not licensed because they did not need to be. Moreover, we had somehow managed
to employ about two thousand employees plus seven thousand five hundred sales organisers, including a high proportion of women, none of whom have felt uncomfortable in any way working for us. The response from JobCentrePlus was nevertheless a negative one, so I decided to invite them to come and meet us and see our operation. They duly turned up and we took them to some of our shops and showed them around our building, just as we’d done with the Dublin Corporation. And we introduced them to people who’d been recruited through JobCentrePlus – but it seemed that they’d made up their minds. Like the Dublin Corporation before them, they had their own agenda.

  What also became evident is that they’d rewritten their policy so that Ann Summers fell outside their criteria. We decided to get our lawyers involved. They examined the policy and confirmed it was designed to exclude us. I was very angry about this because it meant we were being forced to hire staff through recruitment agencies, a move which could potentially cost us up to £250,000 a year. At the same time jobs were being denied to young people who came through JobCentrePlus. The government, in its wisdom, had decided that jobseekers would be too embarrassed to apply for a job with us. The reality was that the JobCentres had never had a complaint from a jobseeker, nor had any of their staff complained.

  Geoff Tyler from Pinsent Curtis Biddle, whom I trust implicitly, said the next step would be to take the case to the High Court. The thought that I could do that momentarily stunned me, but as the idea took hold I realised I had to do it. I suppose it goes back to what I went through in trying to set up a shop in Dublin, and even back in 1985 when I was almost arrested in Bristol. It all feels like bullying and for me that is like a red rag to a bull. I felt that I could challenge this. I knew that taking the case to court would cost money. It would also be a risk to the business because it would focus a great deal of attention on us, but I was confident we would have public opinion on our side because the government was effectively denying work to young people. On Wednesday, 11 December 2002, we issued court proceedings at the Royal Courts of Justice to sue the Minister of State, Nick Brown, and the Department of Work and Pensions. The date for the case to be heard was set: Friday, 16 May 2003.

  Arriving at the Royal Courts of Justice is quite a humbling experience – I suppose in many ways these buildings are designed to do just that. The courts are housed in the Strand, in London, within this magnificent Gothic building which was designed by a man called G. E. Street. The rumour is that the strain of such an enormous project led to Street’s untimely death. The building contains over a thousand rooms. Its architecture is very striking throughout and really does take your breath away. The role of this court is to hear some of the country’s most serious civil, libel and appeal cases. The public are permitted to view all eighty-eight courtrooms, unsupervised – though judges are quick to reprimand people who try to interrupt proceedings.

  So here I am, all 5 feet 2 inches of me (aided by some four-inch heels, of course), walking into this most imposing and formal of buildings.

  I am always very interested in what other people do and how they do it, so quite aside from it being my case, I found the whole process fascinating as well. Meeting our barrister was a key moment for me: I needed to know that she actually believed in what we were fighting for. Her name was Kate Gallafent, a young woman whom I immediately respected and who I felt was right behind me. She was brilliant. She argued that we had been allowed to advertise in the past, ‘apparently without bringing civilisation to an end’. She made the point that it was unfair to allow other companies, whose jobs could offend certain groups of people, to advertise. For example, would a Jew or a Muslim want to work in a non-kosher or non-halal butcher’s shop? There was also the fact that department stores such as Liberty and Selfridges sold sex toys but were allowed to advertise in JobCentres. Kate Gallafent also said that if people were going to get embarrassed surely they would be more likely to be offended if they found a vibrator where they might not expect to, such as in Selfridges, rather than in one of our shops.

  The judge was Mr Justice Newman and I saw he had a twinkle in his eye. There was one point during the case when he said, ‘But even the downstairs part of the Oxford Street store is non-offensive.’ Oh my God, I thought, you’ve been in there. He’d obviously done his research. I had the distinct feeling that he was a fair man. We didn’t get the result straight away so I was on tenterhooks, waiting for almost a month. The judge said we had been singled out unfairly. He said that the JobCentre policy had paid ‘insufficient regard to its legal obligation to assist employers and appears to have paid no regard to the potential benefit which jobseekers could obtain by taking up employment with Ann Summers’. He also said it had neglected the possibility that job ads could be accepted in a way that did not lead ‘to any significant embarrassment to jobseekers’.

  We had won! It was a major moment and one that had no doubt been propelled along by the media. It was also good, knowing public opinion was on my side. I wanted to win because I like winning. But I am also fair and even-handed, and what annoyed me was that the JobCentres broke all the rules on fairness. When you believe so much in something, you want the right outcome. And now I had it.

  As we came out of the High Court, dozens of photographers and TV crews were waiting. I gave a short statement to the journalists, followed by a couple of TV interviews with the BBC and Channel 4. Dan was away that day on a golfing trip while family and colleagues were busy with their commitments, so I took Gary Burgham, my Human Resources Director, and the legal team off for some lunch and much-deserved champagne.

  Defeating the government was a highlight in what was otherwise a very dismal period. My depression – and I still didn’t know for sure if it was depression – was getting worse. I was not only going through bereavement, but somewhere I’d had to find the strength to get through my third IVF attempt. In what was a spectacular piece of timing the eggs for the third attempt were collected the day after Mum’s funeral. I’d previously asked the doctor if I should postpone it but she said it wouldn’t make any difference. I wasn’t so sure – how can stress not play a part? After the first attempt we’d moved to the Lister Hospital in Chelsea, regarded as a centre of excellence for IVF. From a personal point of view the overall experience we had at the Lister was much better than the previous hospital, but once again the treatment did not succeed.

  While all this was happening, my relationship with Dan was going downhill; we were not enjoying ourselves anymore. As I’d feared, the desire to have a baby was threatening to split us up. When one thing is wrong in a relationship and it stays around long enough, it tends to dredge up other issues which may have laid dormant otherwise. That was particularly the case with Dan. He later told me that at this point he had started wondering whether he could have a relationship with me without children. He was grappling with the worry that the person he loved might not be enough for him, and was generally beset by negative thoughts and questioning everything. Was Dan looking for problems? I don’t know. All I do know is that he’d lost sight of the positives in our relationship, and it was starting to bring me down as well. I tried to help him see the bigger picture but I just couldn’t do that and look after myself – something I was struggling to do.

  I wasn’t coping well with Mum’s death but, despite my feeling of total despair, I was still trying to help myself, something I have done all my life. I decided I needed to talk to a bereavement counsellor but had no idea who to turn to. Because of my high profile I wanted to be careful whom I approached in case they took advantage of me, so I decided to contact Beechy Colclough. Beechy had worked with a lot of stars like Elton John, Michael Jackson and Kate Moss, so I thought, well, at least he knows about privacy. Beechy had appeared on television, written a number of books and had a good reputation. Or so it seemed. In 2006 he was actually struck from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy list after a number of female patients complained about his alleged behaviour.

  However, this was 2003 and he w
as held in pretty high regard. I was in such turmoil and had no idea how to find him so I called directory enquiries and got his number – and his fax number. I didn’t want to call so I wrote him a letter explaining what had been going on and why I wanted his help, and sent it off. I’d included my telephone number so he could phone me and make an appointment. The next day I received a phone call from an unlikely-sounding chap. ‘This is Colclough Garages here and we deal in servicing cars.’ Shit! Of all the things to happen now, I had sent the fax to the wrong person and told him all about myself, the abuse, problems with Dan and everything. I was absolutely mortified and, to make matters worse, I couldn’t get this man off the phone. He just kept on talking, and finally I just apologised and put the phone down on him. I was back to square one.